> It is becoming less credible to throw our hands up and say "China has all the silicon manufacturing, guess we have to put up with it!"

The thing is, China doesn't. Most expensive chips are fabricated outside of China in nearby countries and shipped there for final assembly.

What goes on in China is usually human assembly. And that's what seems to have happened here -- in the process of putting chips on motherboards, someone added some bonus chips. It seems like it would be hard to do that without dedicated traces / solder points.